I've recently been recruited into a large organisation in the UK as part of a huge hiring drive the business has engaged in with regards to their development function. I'm a Senior Developer, and my manager is in charge of the whole department.
Around 75% of the department are new with more people on the way, so everything has yet to be established at this point in time. There are around 50/60 people in the department at the moment, and the reporting structure is somewhat in a state of flux with varying job titles and odd reporting lines.
As far as I am aware, I report into my manager for your usual HR functions (appraisals, holidays, etc). For day to day tasks, this depends on what project you've been assigned.
I've recently been put on a project. The company implements projects using a very established Agile approach. There is a huge emphasis around collaboration and communication.
The project itself is extremely simple. Myself and a very small team of new starters have been put to task.
The project is being “supervised” by another Senior Developer (who I believe has been here for a few years), who refers to himself outside the organisation as a “Lead Developer”. He's extremely enthusiastic around the whole subject of development, almost of the point of it seeming as though he's “trying too hard”. He's quite bossy in the way he has briefed us, imposing his own deadlines and deliverables and even belittling the difficulty of the task we've been given.
Other people have commented on this person and his personality already.
I've noticed that over the weekend, out of business hours, he has been heavily altering the code (including deleting various parts of the system) even though this project was obviously intended to be for us to cut our teeth on as us new starters as a team. There was no communication/email sent out here – it's just been changed by himself, I assume, to meet his own “standards”.
It's certainly not the definition of team work, and begs the question why a team was needed to complete the project at all.
So the question is; what do I do here?
The first approach is to talk to my manager – do I raise this as a concern with him? I feel he's reasonable, but I'm new to the company, and this developer isn't. It could make my life tricky in the department.
The second approach is get my CV out there and move as soon as possible. This is of course the easy option in some ways - but I would feel as though I was giving up.
The third approach would be to take this up directly with the said developer. This, in my opinion, is the riskiest approach, considering his overbearing nature. Considering I am new to the company, he may consider this as a challenge to his self imposed authority.